Off Topic

Promotion
Once-per-game feedback requests or release threads are OK, but a considerable history of participation on /r/gamedev is required. Must be a Text Post.

Devlogs that do not have a focus on being useful to other developers. Do not talk about what advancements occurred on your game this week. That is what Feedback Friday, Screenshot Saturday, /r/devblogs, and /r/gamedevscreens are for.

Memes

Explicitly On Topic

AMAs
If you have a unique perspective on something, we'd love to hear it. This is not a way to promote your game/kickstarter/etc, please see above. The focus should be on providing info to the community, not promoting yourself. Be sure to include your education and years of experience to provide some context.

Restrictions

Do not use [tags], assign flair to your post after it's created.

Question posts...
should include what you've already tried and why it was inadequate. Be sure to check the FAQ.

I think you hit the nail on the head. The problem with storytelling in video games is that it is still relatively new, and the popularity of cinema for the last century has skewed our expectations of how a story is told. In movies the viewer passively consumes the narrative. We watch the action unfold and we listen to the dialogue. Sure, we are free to interpret the allegories, but we are still consuming the information in a passive manner.

In games, on the other hand, we are free to pursue the information actively. Just as there is no narrator in your life (save the one in your head) a narrator in games seems somewhat silly. Can you tell a story without dictating anything other than a branching sequence of events? Do we need dialogue in games, and does it even make sense? Should games even have storytelling, how about storyshowing?

Before we had visuals for gaming, the story HAD to be told to engage the gamer, to immerse them. Today, with the advent of computers providing the visuals for us, it takes a lot out of what MUDS had to do, which was describe each room or area with painstaking detail. But there were also stories involved in it. As it should today.

While I agree that we don't necessarily need a narrator to tell us what to feel, or echo our thoughts, I immediately dismiss games that do not have a story (FPS excluded, although CoD Modern Warfare's Campaign and story was beyond amazing.) I played WoW for as long as I did because of the lore. Depending on what type of game it is, it should absolutely have a story. I liken video games to being just like the old time "Choose your own adventure" books.

I'm not advocating the removal of the story element altogether. Can a game tell a story without the usual vehicles explicitly telling the user what is going on? Is it possible to imply what is happening and just let the user figure it out or make up his own? That Game Company (Flow, Flower, Journey) does it to some extent, but their games are exploratory, non-combative adventures. Do you need a context to blow up aliens or whatever?

For my first job I was hired as a writer/designer. And even with that experience, my motto for stories in games is the same as for meetings in game studios: it takes a very good story to be better than no story at all.

Play through and complete "Another World"/"Out of This World". Aside from the credits, there is no printed text: Only trial and error. You keep your eyes open, you make friends, fight enemies, pilot vehicles, experiment with physics, study the reflections of enemies passing under glass globes and listen to their footsteps to determine the right moment to drop the globe and kill the guards...

All done (mainly) in complete silence. I think a playthrough, or even watching a playthrough, (SNES Version I recommend) will open up your mind. If you cannot be told, then you must be shown wether its a demonstration of a negative consequence or the advancement to a new area/furthering the story of your travels through an alien world.

LOTS of content, and the only truly spoken words given to you are in an alien dialect: Otherwise useless, aside from using your basic human instincts to say "Well, that guy said something kinda nice to me and pointed to the right before running off that way... maybe he wants me to follow him?"